


A World With One Sun

by lesbiancharliekelly



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Found Family, and what happened after she was freed and they saved the world and stuff, mostly about Lup's time in the umbrastaff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-07 03:45:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18612451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiancharliekelly/pseuds/lesbiancharliekelly
Summary: Everyone knows that Taako forgot, but he's not the only one. Lup is trapped in the umbrastaff, not sure of who she is or where she is. But it's starting to come back to her, slowly, as the memories of her brother and found family bring her back to herself.





	A World With One Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this lovely piece by neonbo on tumblr: neonbo.tumblr.com/post/184398527290/blupjeans

They used to dance. That’s what comes back to Lup first: her and Barry, arms around each other, twirling around the room. She doesn’t even know who Barry is, just that he’s someone she loves. Even the concept of dancing is confusing at first. She’s been incorporeal for so long, trapped in the dark without a real sense of self. And now here’s this memory so full of motion, that places Lup so clearly in a _body_ , that it takes Lup a while to get a hold of. That’s okay though, because she has plenty of time.

Lying there in the nothingness of the umbrella – she’ll figure out that’s where she is later – she clings to this first memory. She runs her mind over it again and again, like you’d run your fingers over the fray of a rug or a scab on your knee. The more she goes over it, the more details come back to her. Soon, she can remember the light filtering in the window. She has no body, but as she remembers the light she swears she can feel herself sucking in a sharp breath. She’d forgotten about light.

It was early morning, she remembers now. They were in the kitchen, making breakfast. _She_ was making breakfast. She loved to cook. Lup remembers this before she remembers who she is. Cooking. Bacon and eggs and those jewel-like berries they’d found once and the taste of reheated cups of coffee during long nights in the lab. She misses it all.

Food is what brings her back to herself. Even here, in the umbrella, where she can’t eat even if she needed to, even though she desperately wants to – even here, it sustains her. She remembers cooking the eggs that morning sunny side up, even though she doesn’t like them that way. That’s what finally brings Barry back to her. It was Barry she’d been dancing with, Barry she’d been cooking the eggs for. Of course. _Barry_. How could she forget?

Next, she remembers Davenport, because he only liked his coffee made with the French press. And Lucretia, because Lup always had to set aside an especially tantalizing bowl of fruit in the morning to get Lucretia to eat breakfast. She remembers Magnus because she never seemed able to keep up with his appetite no matter what she made. She remembers how Merle always pilled his plate high with eggs, bacon, and waffles before poured syrup over the whole thing, something which Lup found at once vaguely disgusting and endearing.

And then she remembers Taako.

Later, Lup will feel guilty for remembering him last, as if it were something she could have controlled. Later, it will be the one thing she’ll never tell him about her time in the umbrella. It will be the one thing she’ll never tell anybody. Later, she will be standing in the bathroom, brushing her teeth before bed, or lying next to Barry on a warm day at the park, and she’ll be overcome again with the knowledge that she remembered Taako last. She’ll begin running through the same obsessive thought patterns trying to figure out why, and Barry will have to look over and put a hand on her knee, saying nothing, to draw her out of it. It will be something that he’ll get used to – after she comes out of the umbrella, she’ll have the tendency to get lost in her thoughts in a way that is more troubling and all-consuming than before.

Even that will be better than the nights she’ll wake up and, for an instant in the dark, be convinced she’s back here again, in the umbrastaff, all her senses robbed. Barry will have an instinct for when she gets this way. He’ll stir, half awake, and pull Lup closer to him, his arms around her reassuring her that she’s alive and of this world again.

But all this will come later. Here, in the umbrastaff, she has only the memory of Barry and the others for company. Even now that the memory of that morning in the kitchen has fully come back to her, she returns to it often. She remembers how even though Davenport and Lucretia also got up early, Barry and Lup often felt like they had the whole ship to themselves. Davenport would go sit up in the mast and just survey everything, while Lucretia would stay in her room to read or write until the late hours of the morning, leaving the rest of the ship for Lup and Barry.

Other people tend to get up to mischief in the late hours of the night, but Lup and Barry always felt the most like school kids in the early morning, right after the sun came up. They raided the kitchen cabinets, looking for weird remainders of foods from other worlds to see how creative Lup could get for breakfast that morning. ( _Other worlds?_ Lup wonders to herself. But the memory feels right.)

Or they’d use the time to compare notes on the scientific projects they were keeping to themselves. They always had some big idea in its early stages, ones they didn’t want to get everyone else’s hopes up about. It wasn’t just those projects that they kept to themselves, though. There were small projects too, ones with no importance or purpose, ones they did just to see what would happen. Lup remembers that, how they’d be in the lab together with no one else around, and they’d figure out what happened when you mixed this with that, or what the inside of a particular species of bug looked liked. She remembers how scientific discovery always felt like some sort of secret she and Barry were in on together.

Often, though, in those early mornings they would just dance, or run around the hallways in their pajamas (careful not to wake the others up); anything where their bodies could take up space in a world that felt bigger and just their own for a moment.

After these initial memories of Barry moor her, Lup realizes with delight that Barry was not the only one she danced with. Especially in the early years (although the early years of _what_ , she can’t quite recall yet), there had been all those times that she thought Lucretia was working too hard, and so Lup slipped into Lucretia’s quarters humming some song that had been Top 40’s when their parents were kids. She’d lure Lucretia into setting down her books to dance, and Lucretia would always sigh and tell Lup, “Fine. But just for a minute. I really need to get this done.”

But Lup had learned Lucretia’s secret early – Lucretia _loved_ to dance. Lup would take Lucretia’s hand, give her a light twirl, and Lucretia’s eyes would light up. Soon enough, they’d be dipping each other dramatically, dancing their way down the hallway and making a racket as they did so. It was always in the odd hours of the night that they danced, and they were always waking someone or other up. But no one could ever find it in themselves to complain once they saw how happy Lucretia looked for once. (There was always some terrible weight hanging over them, Lup remembers now. She feels it even on the edges of these happiest memories, but she can’t recall what, exactly, it is.)

Merle was someone she didn’t have to lure into dancing – he was, more often than not, the one that would cajole her into it. Especially in the later years (later years of _what_ , she can’t remember), she’d be hunched over a notebook, frustrated, and he’d burst in, singing some Kenny Chesney song. He’d always try to spin her even though she was so much taller than him. Lup glows warm inside at the memory, but she can’t help wondering, frustrated, what it was she had been researching. For all her memories of exploration and scientific inquiry, she can never quite recall the specifics of what it was she’d been trying to find out.

But it’s okay, because then she remembers dancing with Davenport. Davenport almost never danced, except when Lup literally scooped him up and spun him around, so that he’d sputter about his dignity and tell her to put him down. Those times were few and far between, only when she felt he was taking himself too seriously as captain and needed a bit of indignity in his life. (So he was captain, she remembers. There had been a mission. It’s starting to come back to her now.)

Magnus, of course, was easy to dance with. He would dance any time, all the time, always too enthusiastically, always stepping on Lup’s toes or crushing her a bit in his arms. Lup loved it. He could carry a tune surprisingly well, and the two of them always sang duets of old folks songs they’d grown up with, Lup taking the harmony. Lup can almost remember why singing those songs with Magnus always made her tear up. _It’s more than just a nostalgia for childhood. It’s like a nostalgia for the whole world_ , Lup thinks, and feels a lump in her incorporeal throat that she can’t explain.

And Taako. Lup and Taako hadn’t danced much when they were kids. When Taako and Lup were children, adults always used to say they were “too serious.” People didn’t usually believe Lup when she told them this later. Taako had always known how to cheer her up (and vice versa) when they were on the road and things seemed especially bad. They’d learned card tricks and bits of magic that were just for show (Lup could do some great fireworks when she wanted to), and of course pool sharking. But when their feet were sore from spending the day traveling or running around a kitchen making less money than they deserved, dancing just felt like the last thing they wanted to do.

The first time Lup remembers Taako dancing, _really_ dancing, is when they were teenagers and found out they’d both been accepted into the academy at the IPRE. Of course he went all in, shaking his butt and doing lots of crazy hand motion until Lup was in tears from laughing. They learned to dance together, really. At the academy was the first time they didn’t share the same room, which Lup was surprised to find was terrifying and wonderful all at once. So of course they of spent a lot of time in each other’s rooms, and Lup remembers many weekend nights doing face masks, drinking wine, and dancing around the room together.

When Lup danced with other people, it was usually ballroom style, theatrical. There were a set of moves that she knew how to do, the classic spins and footwork. It was different with Barry, of course. Sometimes they’d dance ballroom, but sometimes they’d just hold each other, barely even swaying back and forth, just enjoying each other’s company and the moment. But with Taako she danced like she did with no one else. With Taako, she went all out. They moved their whole bodies, constantly trying to one-up each other with their energy and creativity. Even when Lup danced by herself, she was still reacting to Taako’s dance moves: incorporating them, adjusting them, mirroring them.

And maybe that was why she had remembered Taako last. It wasn’t that he was the more dynamic twin; they both were, pushing over and past and around each other until there was no room to breathe. For her entire life, Taako had been there, just as headstrong as she was. She would say she loved him like she breathed, because it came that naturally to her, only it never came that unthinkingly. With a love as total and as constant as that, there had been plenty of room for fighting, for growing pain. There had been, at times, a sort of claustrophobia, but one that she hadn’t exactly wanted to get rid of. 

It’s only after she remembers Taako that she remembers, finally, the rest of it: what their mission had been, and how it had changed so dramatically. Exactly what it was she’d been researching, how far they’d traveled and how long. She remembers the umbrastaff—she realizes, finally, where she is. She remembers the light of creation, and the hunger, and, lastly, she remembers the relics.

Lup can see, suddenly and so clearly, the day they made the relics. There was a breath between when they finished them and when they released them to the world. A moment to just _be_. And with it came a stunning realization – _we aren’t moving forward anymore_ and then another – _in fact we’ll be moving much faster than usual_. For so long their bodies had been in constant motion as they explored new planes, collected what information they could, and ran. They were always running. But while that momentum had been halted, finally, they were starting forward in a way that was new and quieter and more terrifying than before. They would age, now, for the first time in a hundred years. They would grow old and decay. They were breakable. Maybe (just maybe) now the world wouldn’t die. But one of them could. Lup felt guilty for finding, secretly, this possibility more terrifying to confront.

After they finished the relics, Lup took the phoenix fire gauntlet up the hill with her. She sat there by herself, and it burned her, even without her fully putting it on, but she didn’t let go. Maybe she wouldn’t have gone off by herself for that moment if she’d known. If she’d realized she was going to be alone for twelve years. But maybe she would have anyway.

There is something precious and small in creation, even this kind and on this scale. To feel the particular weight of something you’d only just imagined in your hands. One hundred years, and she’d finally made something that was all her own. They finished them in the late evening and she stayed up all night, until dawn broke, until she could feel the sun on her skin and its mirror image clutched in her palm. _A little bit of something like that_ , she thought. She thought about her home world, how it burned more brightly there, two suns in the sky always. She thought about the sun here in this world without its twin. _Does it miss it?_ She thought. _Does it miss something it never knew it could have had?_ And she thought, _I’d miss him no matter what world I was born into, even if it had been one without him._ Taako had a breakable body, now, on a world without second chances and with only one sun. But still, she needed that ache of being away from him, only just for a moment. _I need to miss you sometimes so we can come back together and laugh about all the things that happened while I was away._ She hadn’t know, of course.

As she remembers, trapped just out of Taako’s reach, she wonders about the light of creation. _Is this how it feels? Trapped by forces out of its control, constrained. Does it miss being whole? Is that what we did to it?_ But there was a second thought too – _Or does it feel like it’s finally known? Broken into parts so it can recognize itself, so it has the mirror of something else to see itself in more clearly._ Other people didn’t have that – they were just themselves, always, no piece of them that held that implicit potential to go missing. Not Lup and Taako. And now he really was missing. Or maybe she was. She wasn’t sure which it was, which one of them was the most gone. But wasn’t that what had made it sweeter, up till now? Having something she could lose. Often after this memory first comes back to her, Lup closes her eyes, or at least pretends to, and thinks of that night on the hill before the dawn broke. She closes her eyes and thinks, _It’s only for a minute._ Taako has forgotten her name, but she knows he misses her, on a world with only one sun.

After she comes back from the umbrastaff, things are different. They have to be. From the outside, everyone thinks it’s Taako that’s changed. He looks different, he forgot who he was. He became a famous chef and killed a village of people and then it turns out he didn’t and he forgot Lup and his family and then he remembered them again. What people don’t realize is Lup’s changed as well. What people don’t remember is that it wasn’t just Taako that forgot. Lup did too. Not for as long, not as dramatically. But she did.

Taako isn’t her mirror image anymore, but even if he hadn’t lost his looks in Wonderland, that would have been true anyway. And maybe that’s okay. Lup isn’t grateful for her time in the umbrastaff, but she can’t hate it either. Just like she can’t hate Lucretia, even that first moment, even when she sees her again after those twelve years, because it is clear that now more than ever Lucretia needs someone to remind her how to dance. Lup knows even then, even with the world still left to save, that she’ll find the time to do just that.

After she comes out of the umbrastaff, everyone knows her story—knows all their stories. It’s weird and exhilarating all at once. Often, people will ask Lup how it is to have Davenport traveling the sea, Taako running his school, Lucretia at the Bureau of Benevolence. To have her family scattered so far and wide. And sometimes, if she’s feeling up for it, she tells them about when she and Taako first got in to the IPRE academy and had those separate rooms. That was before they started saving all of existence, of course. Not everyone knows about it. Sometimes, she keeps that memory to herself.

She likes that there are parts of her story that the Voidfish didn’t broadcast, just as much as she loves being a legend. She likes that Taako was there for all—almost all—of it. She likes that she can visit him whenever she wants to, with a nifty rift that Kravitz taught her how to rend in space-time, just like she likes the mornings when no one’s around, when even Barry has already left to start a case or visit some of the family. The mornings that are small and quiet and glow like candle inside her.

When Lup goes to visit her family, all she really wants to do is dance. Lup dances with Lucretia, who moves like she’s as young as when Lup first met her. Lup dances with Merle, who has definitely picked up some moves in the last 12 years. She dances with Magnus, who has, if anything, become even less graceful, and she even dances with Davenport, who is no less begrudging than he ever was. She dances with Barry, in the kitchen in the morning, when she can almost pretend that the light looks like home, and outside in the afternoon when it’s okay that it doesn’t.

And Taako. She dances with Taako, and it’s like when they were teenagers, and it’s like cycle 87, and it’s like right now. They still dance with everything they’ve got. Sometimes they bring back old moves that were inside jokes, and sometimes one of them dances in a way the other doesn’t recognize, and sometimes they teach each other their new moves and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just take up space near each other and for a moment neither of them look anything alike.

Most of all, Lup dances when she’s alone. She dances and hums and sings and throws her body around all the space that she has in this new and final world, greedy to cover as much of it as she can. Always, when she dances like this, she smiles the brightest. She is radiant. She glows. She is on fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! It's only my second time writing something about TAZ so I'd love feedback. My tumblr is fullyreal1zedcreation if you want to come say hi.


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